Journalism isn't dying, it's reviving

Dan Gillmor

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, June 7, 2007

Journalism's old guard is in a panic. With the latest bad news -- massive editorial staff reductions coming at the San Francisco Chronicle and believable rumors of similar cuts at an already shrunken San Jose Mercury News, among other things -- it's no wonder that people who care about the traditional journalism business are frightened.

But if the issue is the future of journalism -- as opposed to corporate business models -- there's at least as much reason for optimism as paranoia. The same technologies that are disrupting the news industry are offering unprecedented opportunities for creating a more diverse, and ultimately more vibrant, journalistic ecosystem.

Yes, some newspapers and broadcast-news outlets are likely to fail in coming years. Others will satisfy investors' demands by abandoning any remaining pretense of quality journalism. I worked in newspapers for almost 25 years, and have many friends still in the business. I remain an avid newspaper reader and hold shares in three newspaper companies, one of which, through its charitable arm, is helping to support my work.

Most of all, I believe, newspapers have filled an important role in our communities. So the possibilities worry me, too. We can all agree that good journalism and information are among the bedrocks of a self-governed and progressive culture. How will we have it when and if newspapers, which still do much of serious reporting in America, wither beyond value or even repair?

One way we won't get it is by whining and calling competitors nasty names. Take the frequent but misguided charge that search engines are somehow pirating newspapers' work. Forget the inconvenient fact that media companies could easily stop the indexing with simple software tweaks. Search engines do what journalists do every day: making what's called "fair use" of headlines and brief quotes from other people's work. The search engines and aggregators then use hyperlinks to point readers to those very stories on the publishers' own Web sites. Stealing? Come on.

Deriding "basement bloggers" and citizen media creators of all kinds, with no recognition of the enormous variety in the genre, betrays insufficient knowledge, if not willful blindness. No, most blogging and other citizen media aren't journalism. So what? Neither is most writing on paper, most photography, most video or most anything else.

But I can name more than a few bloggers whose work I rely on more than the output from traditional journalists covering the same subjects. Some community Web sites are beating local newspapers and TV to big stories. And citizen journalists of all stripes are looking deeply into niche topics that big media ignore or cover shallowly.

Who'll do investigative journalism, and perform that traditional watchdog function? This is clearly the area of greatest risk. The nonprofit sector already funds some of the best investigative work, and we need even more of this. New experiments are popping up, meanwhile, where traditional journalists work with citizen journalists on investigative projects.

How will we sort out the good from the bad, the reliable from the fanciful, the PR from the analytical? That's not a new issue in any medium. Certainly we will need tools that combine human and machine intelligence to enable the community, professionals and audience alike, to help each other separate the wheat from the chaff.

Encouraging honorable journalism also requires a long overdue update of media literacy. Part of that, I argue, is to better understand the principles of journalism -- such as accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, independence and transparency -- and teach them not just to journalism students but to everyone. When consumers become creators, and creators become collaborators, these principles extend broadly.

There's never been a better time, I tell students, to be a journalistic entrepreneur -- to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how to produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet. The young journalists who are striking out on their own today, experimenting with techniques and business models, will invent what's coming.

Most experiments will fail. That's not a bug in the system, but a feature. It's how we get better.

No one says the transition from what we've had to what's coming will be painless. At best, it'll be messy.

Try to ignore the fringes of this conversation: the old-guard doomsayers and/or elitists who see nothing but woe for journalism, and the tech-triumphalists and/or media haters who can't wait to see today's system blown to utter shreds. These are vapid, false choices. Let's work to keep the best of traditional media.

Meanwhile, smart people -- including the ones working for traditional media companies, most of which are still quite profitable even as trends work against them -- will invent, discover and use democratized media tools to create updated and new kinds of journalistic products and services. The journalistic ecosystem could end up healthier in the end, if we get this right.

What's coming won't be the responsibility of just a few companies or nonprofits. It'll be up to all of us. We will get this right, if we try.

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